Last week Parable Group, which is a consortium of independently-owned Christian bookstores throughout the United States, released their report, “2024 State of Christian Retail.” As I studied the results of their survey of booksellers, I saw lots of bookstore …
Publishing News
AI and Publishing’s Future
About a month ago, one of my daughters, who works for an online security company, startled me by the question she posed, “What is publishing doing to prepare for people who use AI to write books?”
I hadn’t paid much …
Bookshop.org: An Online Alternative to Amazon
Bookshop.org’s founder and CEO, Andy Hunter, could be viewed as prescient. The bookstore site launched in January 2020, just before COVID forced physical stores to lock their doors. Before Amazon downgraded the priority of shipping books and upped the priority …
A Social Media Platform that REALLY Sells Books: TikTok
I need to start out by apologizing. I know writers are weary of being told to build their platforms, to promote their books on social media, to, well, work magic at something most don’t particularly enjoy. I’m one of those …
A Social Media Platform that REALLY Sells Books: TikTokRead More
How Readers Discover Books
One of the biggest challenges for an author, a publisher AND readers consists of the increasing difficulty of matching a wannabe reader with the type of book he or she is looking to buy. A new survey recently was conducted …
Introducing a New Literary Agent
With the entrance of 2021, Books & Such is adding a gem of a new literary agent to our roster, Mary DeMuth. Mary has been a part of the Christian publishing industry for decades, having written 40 books, both fiction …
Introducing New Agent Barb Roose
Today I have the privilege of introducing our blog readers to a new Books & Such agent, Barb Roose. Barb has been a part of our agency for seven years as a client of Rachelle Gardner. All we agents have …
I Only Cheated a Little
I recently read in the daily online newsletter Publishers Lunch about a cavalier cheat that landed UK thriller writer Mark Dawson on the Sunday Times bestseller list. The author not only admitted he bought hundreds of copies of his book …
What’s Next?
As our governing officials turn their attention to how to reopen our nation after the coronavirus recedes, this is a good time for writers to ask themselves, What’s next? What kind of books will consumers want to buy?
A Snapshot
…Coronavirus and Publishing Update
In conversations with our agency’s clients these past couple of weeks, each one has asked me how the coronavirus affects publishing. We, of course, don’t know the long-term affect. But I thought I’d update you all on what’s happened so …